So then why did he even show up? I think your analysis is is flawed.I know many musicians and when they jam with someone or music they are not familiar with they always kick around tunes they all know. I suspect the jam we are talking about was pretty good, just about had to be. The rest of this banter is superfluous.

Excuse me. When I was growing up we used to talk around the table over dinner and by the end of the meal we would always marvel about the different tacks the conversation had taken and where it ended up. Same principal here mate. You really are a fucking pompous arse.

Whatever else was said, if we believe the report, they were disparaging about it and that makes them assholes. Quote: "It was pathetic"

_________________The way I see it Barry, this should be a very dynamite show.

Says that Joe Pass endorsed Ibanez in the 80's, just like Steve Vai. What are the odds that Pass may have played with Vai at NAMM on the Ibanez stage/booth, and this Steve Laury guy has the story all screwed up?

It's possible I suppose. Vai said in a guitar magazine once that he didn't have much interest in transcribing jazz solos since they were pretty much straightforward, but said the chords were more interesting. Or something like that.

_________________One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.

Says that Joe Pass endorsed Ibanez in the 80's, just like Steve Vai. What are the odds that Pass may have played with Vai at NAMM on the Ibanez stage/booth, and this Steve Laury guy has the story all screwed up?

It's possible I suppose. Vai said in a guitar magazine once that he didn't have much interest in transcribing jazz solos since they were pretty much straightforward, but said the chords were more interesting. Or something like that.

So then why did he even show up? I think your analysis is is flawed.I know many musicians and when they jam with someone or music they are not familiar with they always kick around tunes they all know. I suspect the jam we are talking about was pretty good, just about had to be. The rest of this banter is superfluous.

Excuse me. When I was growing up we used to talk around the table over dinner and by the end of the meal we would always marvel about the different tacks the conversation had taken and where it ended up. Same principal here mate. You really are a fucking pompous arse.

Whatever else was said, if we believe the report, they were disparaging about it and that makes them assholes. Quote: "It was pathetic"

Guess I just can't "marvel" over anything in this debate, I prefer to listen to the pompous man himself,FZ

_________________A government Bureau is the closest thing to eternal life on earth that you will ever see

Thanks for the link. As has been said this story is probably bullshit. If this were a true story then they should have played King Kong. I'd like to hear Pass use distortion.

Zappa never learned Giant Steps and it's not a song you just jam. Only an unfair person would judge him based on that. Why should he know standards? Giant Steps is a pain in the ass to learn and for what? To prove to some jazz purist that you are a master? Giant Steps is one of Coltrane's show off songs before he got serious.

Frank had a complete different approach to soloing and he admitted that he wasn't able to solo over chord changes (as in a jazz standard), there are many other guitar players who can't or don't like doing it, the reason is that when you play over chord changes you obviously have to follow the changes, and for many people that distracts them from concentrating on the improvised melody. Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset is one of them and he is hailed as "the new jazz guitar wonder" by some jazz media. Here he explains it:

"I think there are two ways of looking at it," Aarset continues. "I checked out a lot of jazz, and the heavy chord changes, but when I play it, it's stiff, it's stiff—it doesn't flow. I think it's great that people are playing that sort of stuff, but it's not for me. I think it's a misunderstanding that you have to do all these things in order to create music. The reason for doing it, in my opinion, should not be as some sort of gymnastics or exam; rather it should be a tool for helping you to express yourself, to reach that point of musical expression and tell the story which is behind chords and scales—or behind guitars, fuzz boxes and cables for that matter. Whatever harmony, whatever composition you use, at the core it should be to help the music, the emotions. If it's just a big fence standing between you and the performance then it's better to do something else."

Right. I don't like chord changes. I like to have one tonal center that stays there, or possibly with a second chord that varies off the main tonal center. And then I play around that. I don't know if you ever listen to Indian music – there are no chord changes in that, but you can hear implications of all kinds of other chord changes and lines that are played against each other. That's the way I like to work. There's a little four-note vamp in "Treacherous Cretins" [Shut Up `N Play Yer Guitar] that implies Dm and A chords. It creates a harmonic climate. I don't think of them as a chord change. Instead, I look at the whole as a harmonic climate or harmonic attitude that sets up a mood – the combination of the alternation of those two chords. And so I just play inside of that attitude.

Do you think of the two chords as separate entities or as one massive chord that contains all the notes of the two chords?

Both ways. You can play against them both ways, because they're alternating – they never really happen at the same time. But you can play lines that include the notes of both chords. You get to play C sharps and C naturals in that way.

It's probably from around the time FZ jammed with al di meola the Jazz guitarist.

Di Meola is not a jazz guitarist. The guy can't improvise worth a shit. FZ was a great improviser playing over vamps, or a few chords. Guys like Joe Pass and Tommy Tedesco spent years and years practicing guitar for hours on end. But they didn't have a lot of the other skills FZ had.

i feel that a lot of the stuff in his discography people call jazz isn't quite jazz, not even fusion; stuff like 20 small cigars and little umbrellas aside. it sort of reminds me of davis' stuff from 69-75. yeah people call it jazz, but if it was coming from someone who wasn't miles davis would you still call it jazz?

_________________-How long have you been playing the bicycle?-About two weeks.

Just that no Zappa sounds like jazz to me, it has the instruments that comprise "big bands" and ensembles but the drums (again to me) always come from a varese meets rock-n-roll place OR they are jazzy to the point of being tongue-in-cheek otherwise.

Calling Zappa jazz is saying all instrumental music that isn't symphonic but is played by humans is jazz.

For frank to play jazz solos, he wouild have to put some 'rules' in place, and I don't think that was his improvisational style. There are a LOT of his solos over simple two chords shifts, and that allows him to fully exploit that soloing 'key', rather than having to stop and start again a few frets away, various times etc.There was a couple of lines in a thread a few days back where its claimed some people dont get black napkins because the solo key stays put over the chord change. Well, I never felt that. If FZ had changed key with the chord changes, it would have sounded wrong IMO. TT

Not really. For example, my father was a sax player in varous jazz bands back in the day. They all had sheet music and a conductor. He would play solos, but all under the scrutiny of the conductor. The jazz bands I've seen often have 'standards' that sound pretty much the same each time. Jazz solos are usually improvised, but often follow the change in key. i.e. rules. TT

Jazz is a meaningless word at this point. It means nothing. It's like "Love" or "God". Too many definitions have rendered the word meaningless. Jazz could mean "rules" but could just as easily mean "no rules".

Zappa was not jazz, he was inspired by jazz. In my estimation, the closest he came to playing something that was in step with what was current in jazz was in 1976 with the Jobson line up when they did that arrangement of Black Napkins. Parts of Grand Wazoo and Waka Jawaka as well. And any time you've got George Duke in your band you've got some jazz. The '88 big band was obviously jazzy but not at all in step with the jazz trends of their time. Thankfully.

I like Wayne Shorter's definition of jazz, "Jazz is , I dare you". Zappa had some jazz in and out of his music but If I had to label him I would put him in the progressive rock category. Mainly because he was one of the main influences of the entire genre. Yeah but jazz is a way of phrasing not all improvisational music or music that includes improv otherwise Lynard Skynard would be jazz. Ravi Shankar stated his music was not jazz and had a distain for it's so called dissonance. That's his problem.

There are pieces where FZ did do solos with key changing backgrounds: Waka/Jawaka, Blessed Relief, The Ocean is the Ultimate Solution and several others. Admittedly, the appearance of those changes is pretty spread out, he had a significant amount of room to squirm within each key block. A significant proportion of jazz solos are based on a fairly rapid walk through many tonalities and being able to construct a solo on the fly that makes that sound coherent and musical is quite a challenge. For some jazz musicians it's the be all and end all of their love for jazz.

The truth of the matter is that practice and repetition is the main source of that coherence, they're mostly doing it from memory based on previous successful combinations, much like improvisatory comedians. On any one night they sound hilarious and spontaneous, but if you go to every performance of one particular tour you quickly realise the majority of the material is rehearsed and it's all in the skill of presentation and exploitation of the few out of the ordinary opportunities that come up on any given night that give it the feel of spontaneity.

Most jazz musicians bore me pretty quickly, it's a rare extended multi tonality solo that inspires me to listen more than once. That's one of the reasons why I prefer jazz rock to straight jazz. Leading me to the point: what is jazz anyway? The evolution of jazz through the twentieth century is a very complex and multifaceted story.

Zappa spoke about trying the typical type of jazz soloing involving rapid shifts in tonality early on in his guitar career when he played lounges previous to the Mothers and he didn't enjoy it. He came back to it a few times momentarily later on with much the same conclusion. I suppose that experimentation is what led to some of his more spread out multi tonality solos. So, that is one typical part of jazz which is missing from his more jazz like writing. But there are many jazz musicians who have moved away from that as well, and that more spread out type of jazz is not uncommon.

My feelings about FZ and jazz is that he did write jazz music, just not typical jazz, whatever that even means. Rather than arguing about whether or not you can shove any one of his compositions into a jazz mould, consider how much the jazz type compositions he wrote broke the mould and extended it's possibilities. If you haven't studied jazz composers like Charlie Mingus and Eric Dolphy then you'll have a limited view of jazz at best.

_________________The way I see it Barry, this should be a very dynamite show.

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